Former “Young and the Restless” actor Michael Muhney wants him to return to the show, and his fans certainly do, too. They send me a lot of mail and Tweets. Muhney has been off the show for three years, and in that time rumors swirled about why he left.
Today he makes his mea culpa, explanation about his relationship with 30 year star Eric Braeden, and what went wrong on the show. It all comes on a podcast here, at the one hour mark:
Muhney finally talks about the rumor that he’d somehow harassed actress Hunter King on set. He says it never happened, but was a random story started by a blogger. “The rumor was started by some woman in Florida,” he says, which was proven when hired a private detective. Indeed, there were never any formal accusations, no charges at the show or through their union, nothing. Muhney was victim of a fake story. He was screwed.
But he’s got a problem. The fake story was repeated on TMZ’s syndicated TV show where Brian McDaniel, the comedian husband of CBS daytime chief Angelica McDaniel, worked as on camera commentator. TMZ was the only outlet that offered the story– and then they ran eight stories in January 2014. I reported the TMZ-McDaniel connection three years ago. So if this thing with King never occurred, the origin of repeating the story can be traced back to the person who was, essentially, his boss. And that’s a serious situation for CBS.
Back in 2014, I included the video from the TMZ TV show telling Harvey Levin this story. The video has since been removed from TMZ’s website.
Muhney says he was told to hire a lawyer, and had one call TMZ at the time. But TMZ said they weren’t accusing him of anything, just reporting rumors from a “Source.” I don’t know if Muhney made the connection between the McDaniels and TMZ, but it would be worth exploring if he doesn’t get job back and his career has been blemished by the incident.
Is there more to all this? I think so. Stay tuned…
